Edward H. Binns, retired MBA/CPA, organized this blog to discuss quiddity as it relates to our daily lives. Founder of the Urban Coyotes mentoring seminars, which deal explicitly with ethical survival, this blog is closed to entries but remains available for comments. NEW TO THIS BLOG? Please go to the August, 2010 postings and read the 149 postings in order! Current news posts are in the DAILY QUIDDITY blog (link on right hand margin).

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Liberals – Essential Beliefs Deconstruction 135

The central problem with deconstruction is that it is illogical. If it were used in a courtroom, it would encourage incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial testimony and permit character assassination to be employed against the expert witnesses. It allows for chaotic misunderstanding even when discussing timely, critical issues for which strong inferences can be drawn and wise courses of action laid out. Deconstruction erects a verbal tower of Babel instead of engaging in argumentation, itself a contract by parties with different views to use a proven structure to seek the truth.

The proof of the incompetence of deconstruction is the previous blog post: deconstructionists themselves do not realize when they are dealing with a hoax of themselves.

It's hard to catch, dislodge and humiliate deconstructionists. They have a very sturdy lair to which they repair – academia. It's the last stop on the journey of many left-wing 1960s hippies. They are safe there and they know that. The ultimate purpose of their lives has become to infect the next generation with their illogical modus operandi.

These old deconstructionist hippies have a hammerlock on the humanities.

America's colleges and universities have always had their fair share of leftist radicals but as astounding as it may seem today, until the early 1960s the majority of college teachers tended toward the right or at the least managed to avoid the radicalism so thoroughly entrenched today. In TENURED RADICALS, Roger Kimball, himself a conservative critic of the arts, analyzes how and why this transformation has taken place. The villain he notes is that the very faculty who are charged with the education of our young have willingly and eagerly abandoned the search for truth by denying the very existence of absolutes like "truth" "justice" and "universality." Politics, in his opinion, has trumped an impartial quest for a firm and unwavering underpinning for Western culture.

This attack began, oddly enough, in Plato's day as Plato had the good sense to recognize the seductive appeal of rhetoric and could reject it in favor of elevating the reality behind that rhetoric over the rhetoric itself. Kimball notes that over the next two millenia most philosophers have succeeded in avoiding this pitfall--at least until this century whenJacques Derrida began to unravel the meaning of meaning by imputing to it a foundation of relativism that says in essence that human beings can never "know" anything for certain because of unvoidable biases, prejudices, and ideologies. Kimball takes an interesting tack by structuring much of his book in the form of academic conferences in which he attends and by using his trusty tape recorder captures the very words and intonations of speakers who rail against the very jobs that pay them such lofty paychecks. Kimball is a very witty and funny writer. As these academic deans speak their deconstructionist jargon, Kimball will then translate into plain English. As he does so, he, like Dorothy in Oz, swoops away the linguistic curtain that hides speakers who literally exhibit a gross lack of the very essentials that they are expounding.

Kimball is aghast at the willingness of academia to abandon the canon of Great Books. He notes that it is bad enough to suggest that this canon be discarded but that it is infinitely worse to replace it with second and third rate works that are represented only because the authors fall into an acceptable mixture or racial, ethnic, and gender divisions. Kimball also plays devil's advocate by examining the defense of academia against charges that this radicalization of curricula has rendered our nation's humanities departments largely irrelevant. Their defense, he notes, usually takes the tack of a call for "diversity" when the overwhelming number of courses offered today are anything but.

In TENURED RADICALS, Roger Kimball is not optimistic that there will be any significant changes anytime soon. The philosophical mind rot has embedded itself too deeply. For those who still believe that there are still some universal sentiments worth learning, then this book is invaluable reading.